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January212012

#Serres - from The Origin of Geometry

What we have left of all this history presents nothing but two languages as such, narratives or legends and proofs or figures, words and formulas. Thus it is as if we were confronted by two parallel lines which, as is well known, never meet. The origin constantly recedes, inaccessible, irretrievable. The problem is open.

I have tried to resolve this question three times. First, by immersing it in the technology of communications. When two speakers have a dialogue or a dispute, the channel that connects them must be drawn by a diagram with four poles, a complete square equipped with its two diagonals. However loud or irreconcilable their quarrel, however calm or tranquil their agreement, they are linked, in fact, twice: they need, first of all, a certain intersection of their repertoires, without which they would remain strangers; they then band together against the noise which blocks the communication channel. These two conditions are necessary to the diaIogue, though not sufficient. Consequently, the two speakers have a common interest in excluding a third man and including a fourth, both of whom are prosopopoeias of the,powers of noise or of the instance of intersection.(1) <#1>Now this schema functions in exactly this manner in Plato’s /Dialogues/, as can easily be shown, through the play of people and their naming, /their resemblances and differences/, their mimetic preoccupations and the dynamics of their violence. Now then, and above all, the mathematical sites, from the /Meno /through the /Timaeus/, by way of the /Statesman /and others, are all reducible geometrically to this diagram. Whence the origin appears, we pass from one language to another, the language said to be natural presupposes a dialectical schema, and this schema, drawn or written in the sand, as such, is the first of the geometric idealities. Mathematics presents itself as a successful dialogue or a communication which rigorously dominates its repertoire and is maximally purged of noise. Of course, it is not that simple. The irrational and the unspeakable lie in the details; listening always requires collating; there is always a leftover or a residue, indefinitely. But then, the schema remains open, and history possible. The philosophy of Plato, in its presentation and its models, is therefore inaugural, or better yet, it seizes the inaugural moment.

“as the opposite of the passive spectacle in the texts of Guy Debord….”

“the concept of the spectacle implies that images are no longer doubles of things but. but the things themselves, the reality of a world in which things and images are no longer able to be distinguished. Whenever the the image no longer stands opposite the thing, form and image become indistinguishable from one another….”

I was initially intending something rather different, more akin to a rejection of Ranciere’s understanding of art and the media, but when looking at the work again it became obvious that the real problem remains that he is thinking of the spectacle solely in terms of that moment in the 1960s when the Hegalo-Marxist spectacle was understood in terms of images, false consciousness and mass consumption. In a sense whilst that precise moment may haunt Ranciere’s perspective, it is also evidence of how static his work appears to a contemporary non-academic reader. In a mass consumptive network society Ranciere’s focus on the image avoids the necessary extension of the spectacle into language, data, the network society and beyond. In a few years unless checked it will be reaching down into genetics and up into the clouds.

“Guy Debord’s critique of entertainment as spectacle, meaning the triumph of alienated life; the identification of entertainment with the Debordian concept of play as the antidote to appearance….”

Entertainment of course references the ongoing triumph of alienated life. Art does not manage anything better. But let’s be clear that passivity as Ranciere references it exists where readings and theories of the media are not placed within the spectacle.